"wrapping" the ball.

[blahness]

To address some misconceptions about the limits to human reaction to achieve the precision of hit then brush. Contact occurs in milliseconds, however you can still "time" the activation of various muscles in the stroke down to millisecond precision.

For an example of human limits to timing (continuous frame perfect parries down to millisecond precision), look at this:

Hit then brush concept is based on timing rather than "reacting" to the fact of ball contact.

Also, good players can indeed time most or all of their contacts at exactly the sweet spot especially if not disrupted, otherwise they wouldn't be able to achieve that degree of consistency.
Heck I'm not even close to pro level, and after a long session of loop against block, I get a very significant amount of dust right in the middle of the sweet spot. So yes, it is more than achievable.

 

[blahness]

I am going to go with brokenball on this one. The ball flies out of Fan Zendong's blade. I really think that the ball only stayed on his blade for minisecond. Lot of it is most likely follow through.

Let us say "wrapping" exists. What level of playing are we talking about? And would wrapping works better with softer sponge rubber than harder sponge rubbber?

The followthrough affects the quality of the ball significantly. Nothing the pros do is by accident - it's all by design to maximise consistency and speed/spin quality.

The followthrough is a sign of the nature of the contact because of inertia of the various parts of the body. So if you have a curved stroke, you'll achieve a curved contact which has increased dwell time. If you have a linear contact then your dwell time is decreased because the shape of the ball is an arc, and the trajectory of the ball is an arc too.

There is a reason why the blade face is more closed during the followthrough.

 

[longle]

is this what you mean ?

 

[NextLevel]

If you notice, he goes up during the stroke and sidewards/down during the followthrough. Also he contacts roughly perpendicular to the ball, and finishes with a closed racket angle. This is what we refer to as wrapping.

Now there are ppl who use linear strokes with minimal wrapping.

This is a linear stroke at 5:10:

Not sold that is a linear stroke per se but I get what you are trying to show and the explanation is linear..

 

[blahness]

Not sold that is a linear stroke per se but I get what you are trying to show and the explanation is linear..

Waldner also closes the racket angle subtly if you noticed haha, but that is nowhere near the amount of wrapping that Fan Zhendong does for sure.

 

[Der_Echte]

...

Zeio and Nextlevel failed badly. They are no fun. You didn't even try with any kind of bogus theory.

...

I feel plumb O-fended that Der_Echte wasn't called a bum, a meanie, and or a hater for his advocacy of free speech and his stance against Socialism.

 

[NextLevel]

I am going to go with brokenball on this one. The ball flies out of Fan Zendong's blade. I really think that the ball only stayed on his blade for minisecond. Lot of it is most likely follow through.

Let us say "wrapping" exists. What level of playing are we talking about? And would wrapping works better with softer sponge rubber than harder sponge rubbber?

The main point is that the whole stroke has a path, and the path affects the quality of ball you produce and the quality or spin you can control. Good players know what they are trying to do to the ball and swing through paths with their whole body primarily and usually use arm adjustments as final effects to trap spin under pressure or to get lower arcs closee to the table.

If Fan Zhendong swings at that ball differently( finishes differently), the ball comes off differently because it makes his backswing different. The stroke is one continuous effect, the idea of hit then brush is more a signal of how to approach the ball (the racket angle is being affected by a pronating arm or a covering wrist motion, which let's you expose more racket to the ball at contact on some strokes) than a 3 stage instruction that has you consciously swinging one way until contact, then have you do something at contact, them have you follow through after contact.

It is definitely easiest with stickier rubbers. But again, I would like anyone to show me how they play a topspin on a high ball while keeping the racket angle supposedly constant. When you see good players topspin a high ball, you see their wrapping technique on full display because they need to press down on the ball given its height. Most topspins on a high ball would either be weak or go long (or some people just smash).

I have no problem with the idea that what happens to the ball is a function of what the racket does at contact. Where I get confused is the idea that you can separate what happens at contact from the follow through in some strict way (I hope we at least agree that it is silly to separate what happens at contact from the effects of the backswing and forward swing). My table tennis intuition for handling incoming spin more aggressively jumped when I made this connection and I started hitting much harder shots in practice.

That's why I always ask the question: if you don't believe the follow through matters for ball quality, what are the most powerful topspins you play? Of course, someone looking at Fan Zhendong without playing that shot can always intellectually pretend that all Fan Zhendong is doing is maintaining a racket angle throughout the stroke and then folding his arm to recover quicker. But if you play powerful topspins like that, you will know that this is not how Fan thinks. Enough world class players have discussed the topic to know that the constant racket angle model is not how they think when hitting powerful spin shots.

 

[zeio]

On second thought, it wouldn't be fair to ME not to post my own drills again so that folks get a better idea where I have come from in shaping my interpretation over the past decade.

In the drills, I "demonstrated" the loops at various power levels (30-70%) and distances, hitting more/less, brushing more/less etc. At that point, it had been 2 months since I last touched my racket and 2 years since my last serious multiball session. Played with a 40mm celluloid DFish 3-star ball, and a 15-month old unboosted setup, commercial H3 Neo 2.2 unspecified hardness, Hexer HD 2.1, and Viscaria.

Lastly, I grew up playing around people in div A/B/C (top 120/360/600). I have been doing these strokes with the various "mental constructs" (which I never gave a serious thought, let alone how to call them) before these internet forums popped up. Here is a video where the best player in my club had the honor of getting owned by a world class player. And one against a former CNT player from whom I once took a lesson in my junior days.

Mythbusting? Hardheaded engineer has got some serious balls.

 

[NextLevel]

Here is Timo Boll discussing the approach of hitting the ball more open and pronating the arm or closing the angle at contact as an alternative approach to setting the angle early and adding topspin. Again the fact that he makes a distinction between the two approaches is the important thing here because some people can watch video and never see the distinction. Engineering experts can inform us that he is dealing in fictions, but like I have said on many occasions, it is a waste of time being an engineer in table tennis if you do not have proper strokes.

You can watch the first 6 minutes for full context (it is a video analysis as a Birthday present to a promising junior paid for by the father from Boll). Subtitle and auto translate but you can just watch him if you are familiar with even the concept of pronation.

 

[zeio]

Wrapping the ball (closing the angle during contact) helps generate topspin because it extends contact time. Though the difference can only be a fraction of a millisecond, the effect is fairly obvious in practice.

One Polish study supports that notion.

http://mytabletennis.net/forum/foru...ID=1112095&title=looping-racket-angle#1112095

It is likely that the racket reaches maximal velocity immediately after the first contact, but still with the ball remaining “at the racket”. We propose that prolonged contact between racket and ball during acceleration increases rotation due to the effects of friction (Lufang et al., 2013). This could be confirmed by using higher frequencies in the motion analysis system.

...It is also possible, that the rapid internal shoulder rotation helps to control the ball by ensuring that the ball is “covered” by the racket and extending the duration of contact between racket and ball.

 

[jammmail]

Theres a video Dan and Tom have done with tips on the BH with Pitchford where he visualise going up and over the ball for his BHs to help the stroke. With the side by sides with Dan you can see how flexible and fluid he is compared to Dan which obviously delivers the spin.

 

[zeio]

To address some misconceptions about the limits to human reaction to achieve the precision of hit then brush. Contact occurs in milliseconds, however you can still "time" the activation of various muscles in the stroke down to millisecond precision.

For an example of human limits to timing (continuous frame perfect parries down to millisecond precision), look at this:

Hit then brush concept is based on timing rather than "reacting" to the fact of ball contact.

Also, good players can indeed time most or all of their contacts at exactly the sweet spot especially if not disrupted, otherwise they wouldn't be able to achieve that degree of consistency.
Heck I'm not even close to pro level, and after a long session of loop against block, I get a very significant amount of dust right in the middle of the sweet spot. So yes, it is more than achievable.

Never expected to see the Daigo Parry reference in a table tennis forum. LOL

Your post came at the perfect timing as I was thinking about writing on a similar point. Put another way, the players are seeing into the future by interpolating with some kind of algorithm (intuition honed by all the practice and training?) and executing the stroke ahead of time, where the hitting and brushing components take place out of phase, that is, concurrently (simultaneously) yet independently (separately) in sequence. That is what is really meant by the phrase "accelerate the stroke and brush upon contact", by timing the late acceleration stage of the upward component of the stroke moments after the forward component of the stroke has reached the maximum velocity moments before contact.

More and more recent studies show that all those "mental constructs" are not that far off from the scientific measurements. It comes down to the details (voids, unknowns) that people had to fill in by guessing to the best of their experience and knowledge (intuition again?) because they just didn't know for sure as they didn't have the tools to peek beyond "the event horizon".

 

[zeio]

http://mytabletennis.net/forum/foru...ID=1006620&title=pronation-supination#1006620

Both pronation and supination are involved in FH and BH, respectively. You can feel it, but pronation is usually too small to catch on camera. Supination is more noticeable during the followthrough, when the forearm returns to the neutral position.

https://youtu.be/HHUtg728XOg?t=11

I know of a few studies from China and Taiwan that show players do pronate on FH and supinate on BH moments before and through the contact.

 

[NDH]

On second thought, it wouldn't be fair to ME not to post my own drills again so that folks get a better idea where I have come from in shaping my interpretation over the past decade.

This right here is a great example of how posting video of yourself can really help add context to a discussion.

I'm not saying that every good player has opinions that I agree with (about technique/coaching/equipment etc).

But when you have a low level player who has never hit a very good topspin (I don't say that to be cruel, but the video evidence I have seen would indicate that the OP can not truly understand what is required to hit a good topspin), trying to argue with a player who can very clearly hit consistent, excellent top spins......

You see how ridiculous this all sounds.

In normal circumstances, I'd think it was fine for *any* player to question a technique or an opinion, and I would hope that the higher level player could explain what they mean - This benefits everyone.

Given the history of the OP, and the personal nature of the thread, I'd just ignore it completely.

 

[NextLevel]

I'm not saying that every good player has opinions that I agree with (about technique/coaching/equipment etc).

One of the first things a high level coach told me was that good coaches disagree all the time in table tennis. But the main thing that kept the disagreements fruitful was that the discussions were usually grounded in their experience playing and developing players. So even when they disagreed, it was usually a nuanced conversation about something and you always learned something interesting even when the conclusion was one you disagreed with after the conversation was over.

 

[Takkyu_wa_inochi]

I dont understand OP insistence on this matter when there is so much evidence.

One big thing to understand is that the contact with the ball and the rubber is not at a « point »
The rubber is elastic and the ball sinks into the rubber so the contact is on a surface and not a single point and the contact lasts more than an « instant »

The rest follows.

I let the physicists and modelers explain in detail the theory but all the pros show it in practice.

 

[NextLevel]

I dont understand OP insistence on this matter when there is so much evidence.

One big thing to understand is that the contact with the ball and the rubber is not at a « point »
The rubber is elastic and the ball sinks into the rubber so the contact is on a surface and not a single point and the contact lasts more than an « instant »

The rest follows.

I let the physicists and modelers explain in detail the theory but all the pros show it in practice.

If you don't understand then you haven't watched him play. If you get as much spin from OX hardbat as you do from Tenergy, then you draw conclusions from that, you end up where OP is.

 

[turbozed]

I dont understand OP insistence on this matter when there is so much evidence.

One big thing to understand is that the contact with the ball and the rubber is not at a « point »
The rubber is elastic and the ball sinks into the rubber so the contact is on a surface and not a single point and the contact lasts more than an « instant »

The rest follows.

I let the physicists and modelers explain in detail the theory but all the pros show it in practice.

This is what I took away from the last time this topic came up in the "don't blame your rubber" thread. I think the model brokenball proposes relies on a one-dimensional contact point and an instant time of contact. I think it's safe to say that while this model can approximate reality in some or even most situations, it is clearly incomplete by definition.

The onus really is brokenball to demonstrate that the contact time and contact point is so small as to render human adjustment impossible or insignificant. The mountain of anecdotal evidence from the highest level players and coaches with lifetimes of experience is against him, so its on him to answer these questions. He's making a strong claim, and he's also advancing it as obvious. So he has the burden of convincing everybody of its obviousness. The fact that he can't speaks to either his trouble communicating or a hole in his logic that he hasn't yet identified.

 

[brokenball]

I feel plumb O-fended that Der_Echte wasn't called a bum, a meanie, and or a hater for his advocacy of free speech and his stance against Socialism.

You have a chance to show you are more intelligent than the rest of the forum.
Answer my questions above or be wise, make some popcorn and drink a beer. Enjoy the show and don't feel being left out..

@forum, notice that after all this time, no one has presented ANY FACTS! No calculations, just opinions.
How much of the ball gets wrapped?
How fast is the rotation of the wrist that wraps the ball.

It is clear that too many have been talking about stuff they know nothing about.

 

[brokenball]

I dont understand OP insistence on this matter when there is so much evidence.

One big thing to understand is that the contact with the ball and the rubber is not at a « point »
The rubber is elastic and the ball sinks into the rubber so the contact is on a surface and not a single point and the contact lasts more than an « instant »

The rest follows.

I let the physicists and modelers explain in detail the theory but all the pros show it in practice.

You sound like Adam Schiff.
Let's see the evidence!
You are right about the ball not being a point. But how much does the ball sink into the rubber? The ball doesn't stay round. It compresses too. I recently made a thread about this showing how the ball compresses as it is squeezed 0.001 inches at a time. Notice that the ball compresses WITHOUT wrapping the ball.

NOTHING you do violates physics.

Next!